Mediated Construction of the People: Laclau’s Political Theory and Media Politics

Abstract

In his book On Populist Reason, Ernesto Laclau (2005) encapsulates his political theory up to that point, arguing that “populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such” (p. 67). By this he means that, through an understanding of the oft-denigrated phenomenon of populism, we can grasp some of the fundamental, discursive operations of all politics. The most crucial political operation is the discursive construction of the primary subject of modern politics, the people: “the political operation par excellence is always going to be the construction of a ‘people’” (p. 153). Thus, in Laclau’s view, all politics is populist, though some is more so than others (p. 154), because all politics partakes of the “social logic” of populism (p. xi). More precisely, Laclau means that populism is the political logic of democracy, which he regards as “the only truly political society” (Laclau, 2001, p. 10). Certainly, on the face of it, the demos or people must be central to any conception of democratic politics. And if, as Laclau holds, there is no political subjectivity prior to its discursive construction, then surely we must attend to the operation of that construction as the condition of possibility for democracy.

I would like to thank the editors of this volume, an anonymous reviewer, Michael Kaplan, and Michael Lane Bruner for their comments on a previous version of this chapter.